Neal Ardley, as a player of the original Wimbledon and now the manager of the reincarnated version, represents a unique bridge between the past and the present. Photograph: Alex Morton/Action Images

Neal Ardley comes across as an affable guy but if you ever feel the need to annoy AFC Wimbledon's manager, there is one surefire way to succeed: tell him you thought he was a wonderful midfielder back when he played for Milton Keynes Dons. "There was one coach I used to work with at the [Cardiff City] academy who knew that no matter how much I took the mickey out of him, he could get me with that one every time," says Ardley. "My face would just go ..." – at this point the 40-year-old does a fair impression of a bloodthirsty ogre – "That eats away at me because I never played for them. You look at Wikipedia or whatever and it has a comment to the effect that I played nearly 300 times for MK Dons. No, I didn't."

Ardley played nearly 300 times for Wimbledon, which, as you may have gathered, is not the same thing as MK Dons. For most people connected with Wimbledon, MK Dons is the club that hijacked their one and absconded to Milton Keynes to raise an illegitimate offshoot; the real Wimbledon, in their view, was wound up in 2004 before fans founded a phoenix club, AFC Wimbledon, that rose from the ashes and soared up through the leagues, ascending five tiers in nine seasons to its current perch in League Two.

Ardley, as a player of the original Wimbledon and now, since October, the manager of the reincarnated version, represents a unique bridge between the past and the present. His sense of grievance runs strong, though he strives to restrain it ahead of Sunday's FA Cup second-round tie, which compels AFC Wimbledon to confront the club that their owners – the fans – believe should not exist. "I feel what's happened was wrong, it was a terrible thing," says Ardley, who, at the time of Wimbledon's slow demise, was among the players who felt the loss deepest.

"The ones that felt strongest were the ones who had come through the youth team or been there a while and understood it all," he recalls. "I was thinking: 'This is a club I've been at since I was 11 years of age, what's going to happen to it?' You can't help but go: 'Hold on, this is my club.' We were praying and hoping that something like that wouldn't go ahead but it did. I think possibly the Norwegian owners of Wimbledon at the time, without knowing the history and what the club was about, they probably sold their soul a little bit and got out and didn't think about everything there. Milton Keynes were just looking at trying to get a club in Milton Keynes and Wimbledon were the most vulnerable. The FA have already said that it will never happen again so you can draw from that what you will."

There are people who feel even more angry than Ardley, a fact that the manager has had to factor into his preparations for the game. Sensitivities are so raw that, for example, he felt it would have been unwise for him to scout his opponents personally. "It's a case of not stoking anything up," he explains. "You get seen, it gets reported, you're always going to upset somebody. Maybe it's one of your own fans saying: 'What's he doing there?' Or one of their fans saying: 'Oh, they have a pop at us and then they turn up to watch.' There's already enough emotion involved in this so the thing to do is not to enflame it. You wouldn't find their manager sitting in our stand. So I think it's right that we stay away from each other."

AFC's supporters are wrestling with similar thoughts. The club has sold its full allocation of just over 3,000 tickets but many of those who bought them are unsure whether they can stomach validating MK Dons by going to their ground. Likewise, the club's officials are refusing to accept any hospitality from their Milton Keynes counterparts. "Over the last nine years a lot of fans of other clubs have not gone to watch Milton Keynes because of what they feel was a wrong," says the chief executive, Erik Samuelson. "So for us to say: 'We'll pop in, shake hands and have a prawn sandwich' would be a bit disrespectful to them. That wouldn't be appropriate and arguably it would be hypocritical."

Samuelson is one of the many supporters who helped forge the happy flipside of Wimbledon's sorry demise, propelling the reborn version from the bottom of the football pyramid all the way up to League Two. Ardley was one of 4,215 spectators at their first competitive home match, a 2-1 defeat by Chipstead in the Combined Counties League on 21 August 2002. Now that he is in charge he cherishes the fact that fans from so many other clubs recognise what his has achieved.

"We got a train home from Morecambe on Saturday and there were a lot of Millwall fans on it," says Ardley. "We got talking and the brilliant part is when you hear Millwall fans say what a fantastic club this is. You think: 'Blimey, this is south London club to south London club, they should hate anyone local' but they said: 'We hope you do well on Sunday, you're a great club.' There are a lot of people willing us to do well."

Ardley knows it will take more than goodwill to beat MK Dons, especially as he has not yet got permission to use any of the six loan players who have been so important to his team this term, and top-scorer Byron Harrison is a doubt with a back injury. Because whatever his objections to his opponents' origin, Ardley is an admirer of MK Dons' play. Indeed, the DVDs suggest Karl Robinson is a brother-in-arms, cultivating the style that Ardley fostered when he was at Cardiff's academy before AFC Wimbledon appointed him manager less than two months ago.

"From what I've seen of his team, [Robinson] is an exceptional young manager," says Ardley. "The football they're playing is the football I've trying to be playing for the last five years at academy level. It needs a lot of work and patience from the coaching staff and a lot of bravery from the players, and it's pleasing on the eye. It's not set positions, there's a lot of rotations and movement and technical ability. But seeing what they're trying to do and stopping it are two different things. When good players get it right, it can be unstoppable. What we've got to do is try our hardest. If they're gonna beat us, let's make them play well to do it."